Making of: Filming a Documentary in Nairobi

by Aurelie Salvaire Nairobi Uncategorized

A project by The A Factor, Global CAD, and VOCES.

Two weeks.

That’s all we had. Two weeks to prepare and shoot a 30 minute documentary in Nairobi on social innovation–to show how the city is bustling with new ideas, projects and entrepreneurs. Two weeks to get the technical team on board, to get to know each other, to find the right angle and narrative to best convey our message. Easy, we thought…We can do it!

Monday, 12th of August. This is our first breakfast. For the first time, I meet Ana and Juan from VOCES and Pepe and Nadia from Uranes Films. Objective of the day: to understand the local context, but above all, the why of the Innovation Tours and of The A Factor. How can my story and my quest relate to the audience? Why do I want to give visibility to local entrepreneurs? The complicity is born. Even if our paths differ, between UNICEF, TV and music production, we all share the will to have a positive impact, to bring a different image of Africa in general and cooperation in particular, and a tipping point in life where we all wonder what will be our next steps. This initial bond connects immediately and will facilitate the hectic days to come. At night, we watch Nairobi Half Life as a first introduction to the city.

Tuesday, 13th. We have our initial meetings at iHUB, Growth Africa, and 88mph. The team discovers for the East Africa with fresh eyes, and visiting the key city’s incubators helps us to feel the pulse of this vibrant city. Yet, it is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the multiplicity of projects and the ticking clock of the deadline: In a few hours, Innovate Kenya tells us how they directly source new projects in schools through a global ideas competition sponsored by Google. Roger tells us about the political puppet TV show called XYZ, viewed by 10 million people every month and about their platform Boni TV, a local kind of Netflix with videos from all over Africa. We visit the iLab, the tech incubator set up by Safaricom in the private Strathmore Business School, as a future Wayra of Telefonica.

Wednesday, 14th. The team splits. Anna and Pepe feel the need to stay at home to work on the narrative. We are not talking about a classic journalistic report with enchained interviews. They want to raise the bar higher. A proper documentary, with a story line, a fictional approach and a logical thread the audience can relate to. What are the visual images we have in mind? We share ideas of videos from Amelie to Leolo, to videos from our colleagues of What Took You So Long. Pepe and Nadia show us the video or their last videoclip. We are captivated by their vision.

Thursday, 15th. Juan, Anna, and I are still visiting local projects, interviewing potential “characters” and assessing the right initiatives to display. So many criteria to take into account: how to create a representative image in so little time; how to ensure a balance between male and female interviewees, Kenyan and expatriate; how to guarantee a mix of sectors, from the technological to youth empowerment through sports, from activism to agriculture or crafts? The choices are tough. With Juan, we identify around 10 key criteria to make our decisions more objective and structured. It sounds like Eurovision. The table is soon filled with post-its of the different projects. Pepe and Nadia are strict: no more than 4 main projects will get 4 minutes of time, and only 2 secondary projects will be featured. It takes me ages to eliminate any option. This is because I am a Libra and I want it all. I manage to convince them that we could feature a saturation peak in the documentary with an enumeration of the projects that haven’t been featured so far. They accept. I relax.
The first pre-selection is done.

Friday, 16th. We finish the week visiting different projects related to arts promotion: Kuona Trust and its promotion of local artists for the last 18 years; Go Down Arts Center and its cluster of TV and dance related start-ups; Pawa254 as coworking of journalists, graffiti artists and activists; and Tsunami Studio, the African Pixar. We visit the Hot Sun Film School, which trains the youth of Kibera in filmmaking for no charge. They also produce films and videos to question the image of the life in the slums, they have their own TV Channel Kibera TV, and they are actively participating in the Slum Film Festival displaying videos for and from the slums. In Sarakasi Trust, dancers and acrobats prepare their next show. The team of the NEST (because art is life) tells us about the vibrant fashion scene as Kapoeta and the coming fashion show by Katungulu Mwendwa. Every new meeting shakes our selection. New contacts appear, the web widens. There is so much to show, so much to say and so little time.

It’s Friday night. We all agree on a final selection. Pepe reads us the storyline. We approve. Like every other day, the meeting ends late at night in the house we all rented for the occasion. It is now time to slice the story into shots, gather them into the different locations and, according to the duration of the scenes, schedule the shooting plan. Production starts. We are crazily calling people, matching agendas, finding extra cameraman or sound professionals, renting a slider or an extra tripod that actually works. The phone doesn’t stop ringing. And we are glad to have Wi-Fi at home…

Saturday, 17th. Shooting starts. To merge work and fun, we take part in the community class by the Africa Yoga Project that we want to feature in the documentary. After 2 hours of effort, we interview Billy on how he manages to train youth from the slums to be yoga teachers and make a sustainable living out of it. He tells us how this project especially changes the perceptions of students in their communities—it changes how the youth’s families and friends see them, and also how the youth see themselves. It fosters mutual respect in the community.

In the afternoon, we shoot at Kuona Trust. There’s an event taking place that is sponsored by Absolut Vodka, and it’s where the local hipster community gathers. This is our opportunity to discover Cyrus’ art pieces, acclaimed by TED and international media.

Sunday, 18th. The wake up rings early today! We need to interview Maria Springer, the founder of Livelyhoods before she leaves for Ghana. We reach the slum of Kangemi when everybody is heading to mass and loudspeakers all over are praising God with high-pitched voices. Kids gather around our cameras and Pepe is having a hard time filming without drawing too much attention. Slums inhabitants are tired of poverty tourism and expats taking dramatic pictures of their misery. Yet, people are quite helpful when we explain we want to showcase this project which is actually employing local youth to sell goods as cooking stoves or solar lamps to the community.

Monday, 19th. The sky is grey and the air chilly. Yet Alfred, our amazing driver (and at times bodyguard), brings us to the most representative places of the city: the meat market, the university, the train station, the memorial of the bombing of the US embassy, etc… We even try to get an official license for access through thousands of corridors and offices at the city council but it’s above our capacity…The view from the top of the KICC building is impressive. Pepe climbs on the top of buses to shoot the chaos of the Matatu Station. We are covered with dust when we arrive at 88mph to interview Kyai, the founder of Mchanga, a mobile platform allowing users to raise funds for personal causes (wedding, funeral, education, etc.) through their mobile phones.

Tuesday, 20th. As always, we wake up at 6:30am to shoot some scenes and timelabs at home. I have to change between the different clothes I wore during the week to ensure everything will be coherent during editing.

9:30: Alfred comes to pick us up and we join Kawangware, one of the slums where Livelihoods operate, in order to shoot one their young salesmen “in action”. Kate, his neighbor, is cooking ugali, the local traditional flour paste, on the cooking stove we brought from Ecozoom. She loves it! So we decide to leave it for her as a gift. Kids are playing football outside and Kate loves to be the actress for a few minutes.

On our way back, we interview Catherine, one of the founders of ShopSoko, an online platform connecting local artisans crafting jewels for American, and soon European, buyers.

Wednesday, 21st. We have a long day ahead of us. We first head to Githurai, 30 km north of town to meet Katherine, one of the artisans of ShopSoko, at her home and workshop. Five or six women are sitting next to a cow, cutting papers, rolling them into beads, painting them, and creating colorful earrings or belts. We then come back to the city to pick up the two founders of SunCulture, Charles and Samir, and then head towards Limuru and the field where a farmer has installed their sun-powered irrigation system. We find a very clean and organized field where Peter has multiplied his income by 10 in just one year by using the new irrigation system and switching from corn to tomatoes and onions, which are more profitable crops. On our way back, we get stuck in the famous Nairobi traffic jams for hours…What a long day!

Thursday, 22nd. Today we work on our last main project: Pawa254. We first interview Njeri on the objective of this coworking space: rehabilitating artists and empowering youth. We then climb onto the rooftop where a large painting of Nelson Mandela overlooks the skyline of the Central Business District. Two artists paint some new graffiti for us. We meet again with Chief Nyamweya from Tsunami Studio to discuss how we could work with them during the post-production process. In the afternoon, we head to 88mph to interview Jonathan Kalan, the local correspondent of BBC, specialist of technology and innovation. Then we head to iHub to interview Jessica Colaco and Jimmy about the launch of their technological coworking. We are so exhausted people can read it on our foreheads. And yet, we finish on the terrace of the iHUB and wait for the sunset for a last Timelab…

Friday, 23th. The alarm rings. We don’t want to hear it. We feel dizzy. We make a quick trip to Sarakasi Trust to film some of the acrobats. Most of them are in Mombasa for a show but we manage to get a special exhibition, just for us.

Then we head back home to shoot the final interviews. Nanjira, Federico, and Lino pass by to tell us their vision on the local ecosystem, its challenges and opportunities. We then shoot some final scenes—one of the scales representing the Libra and, of course, some last taxi drives.

15:30. That’s over…

We feel excited and sad at the same time. The first part is over. Yet we still have a lot to do in editing and postproduction.

Let’s imagine where we will do the screening here later this year!

But now it’s time to relax and enjoy Kenya as a tourist for the first time.

By: Aurelie Salvaire

What Innovation Means

by Aurelie Salvaire Uncategorized

Innovation—it’s all about hybridizing the right animals…

The first challenge when bringing external stakeholders to emerging markets is, of course, to defy the stereotypes. Many people have never been to Africa and are fuelled by the media’s dramatic vision of riots and political instability. Unfortunately, what makes these markets extremely appealing, high growth rates and constantly changing environment, are precisely why they are too much of a threat to the eyes of Northern investors who are looking for some kind of security.

Yet, that is exactly what we are searching for: the “jugaad”, or kenyan “jua kali” where innovators do improvise—they try, fail, and can relive the process. It’s like a videogame where you can always gain your life back. As Navi Radjou explains it, “Corporate leaders confronted with increasing volatility and uncertainty in their own business environment must also learn to think and act flexibly.” Our main goal is thus to challenge the traditional vision of emerging cities and to show the power of improvisation of this frugal innovation: in the face of nothing, can I create something?

At The A Factor, we deepen our roots in different networks, formal and informal, in order to scout and identify sources of inspiration. That is also how our own internal process works: far from being sequential and planning a long time in advance, we generally proceed with a multiplicity of simultaneous open windows in our browsers, leveraging social media and tapping into local, regional, or international groups or networks like Sandbox or Makesense to get connected to the right people in an extremely limited amount of time. We try, we propose, we fail, we adapt and move on, constantly.

We are moved by the same spirit as Makeshift, a worthwhile print and online magazine about creativity in informal economies, displaying projects where regulations and resources may be scarce but where ingenuity is used incessantly for survival, enterprise, and self-expression.

Our main asset (but also our main struggle) is our firm belief in the power of hybridization. We believe that innovation comes out of mixing profiles or concepts that were not initially “supposed” to meet. Let’s remember not so long ago, who would have dared to mix social concepts and business? Or philanthropy and profit? Who would have thought that we could answer crucial social questions and yet be economically sustainable?

Many of the local innovators we give visibility to are social entrepreneurs, either mature and established ones, such as Ashoka and Acumen fellows, but also early stage ones in the pipeline like the Africa Yoga project, who empower youth from the slums through yoga teaching, or Mobius Motors, who build specific affordable vehicles designed for bumpy African roads.

As Alfons Cornella mentions it in his book Ideas x Valor = Resultados, “to hybridize means to create new products or services from the combination of already existing ones and to apply it to process and people, to the input, development or output of the product.”

We are convinced that the future is all about getting the right mix: mixing money and mobile as with Mpesa, mixing engineers and makers as in Fablab, mixing guerrilla techniques with traditional video shooting as with What took you so long? This last group is using informal and flexible methods of filming to fit the context, traveling by public transport, immersing themselves in the local reality to shoot videos that have the potential to change the world.

This concept of mixing also supposes the involvement of different people in a process of co-creation, of crowdsourcing the collective intelligence to solve today’s challenges together.

As Rachel Botsman once predicted, the best innovative examples will come from collaborative approaches, whether they be in the consumption patterns, or as open innovation sourcing ideas to solve corporations’ challenges through the power of the crowd. We can all challenge our traditional environments through a simple question: “Why not?” And we can use everyday ingenuity to solve problems, big and small.

It is also a question of breaking up the silos between grassroots entrepreneurs and corporations with resources, being the middleman between the underworld of ideas and the upperground of corporations, connecting the solid and established with the moving, volatile, and emerging in order to create wealth. We connect knowledge, experience, and resources with audacious individuals with crazy vision and passion. We wish to mix the inertia and sometimes brakes of more established organizations with emerging companies with little brake but little acceleration or scale up capacity.

For us, multidisciplinary is synonymous with richness. That is why we try to incorporate so many different kinds of organizations in our tours: not only tech start-ups but also political activists or university incubators as ILAB of Strath university. This mix creates the diversity that gives rise to great ideas.

We also think that contagion is key: when you are surrounded by entrepreneurs, innovators, dynamic and curious individuals, energy is contagious. Whether you’re an executive on the path to becoming an entrepreneur, or a student deciding on a career, you should be surrounded by inspiring examples of innovation!

Innovation also comes from mixing profiles within the team or the participants: with the proper structure, a retired entrepreneur from Holland can learn from a design student in Kampala and the challenge is to know how to curate this mix, how to balance it and to make it work. When everybody is talking targeting, making it specific, at The A Factor, we are fostering horizontal innovation and peer-to-peer learning.

Yet, that structured serendipity is not easy to reach. And without proper planning, it can easily be messy. There are lots of risks, like bringing in too early-stage investors who might be frustrated by the complexity of the market, or not getting the right fit between participants and local projects.

We believe that the key to adapt in our current ultra-competitive and constantly changing world is to find the right balance between the security and the risk, between business as usual and exploring new ideas, between being efficient and being different.

So when confirmed entrepreneurs in a post-validation phase like M-spark or investors are wishing to discover a new ecosystem, we search within our different networks to identify the most suitable matches for them. However, we don’t limit our program there because we know that innovation also comes from surprise: from a circus show or a visit to a mobile clinic that is not directly related to the sector or the needs of the participants, but that can challenge the group’s views and spark its creativity.

The key to our Innovation Tours is its element of surprise. We show our participants what we can learn from misfits, exploring the “dark side” of innovation, learn from those working under extreme constraints when traditional approaches fail.

Yet, this reverse innovation and cross fertilization we are hoping for is not always predictable. In some cases, the communication does not work and the competitive intelligence the participants or local partners are looking for is not exactly what they were expecting.

Even for ourselves, It is all about effectuation, and our own internal process is built from who we are, who we know, and what we want to do from it. We interact with others, look for commitments from other stakeholders, and try to measure our affordable loss, in case it all fails…

What is sure is that innovation is no longer confined to R&D departments of companies. Innovation has to be at the core of the whole organization, absorbed by each individual or employee to generate a real culture of idea generation. But this challenges deeply rooted cultural structures, the risk aversion, the fear of the unknown, the craving for stability and predictability.

So how to we break down these structures? We challenge our participant to get out of their comfort zones, to sing in front of the others, to listen to people from other ages and backgrounds, to spend a day in the slums working with a local entrepreneur, and to learn from themselves as well as from the others.

And to know how to scout, explore and hybridize is really the key to success.

The Education Revolution

by Aurelie Salvaire Uncategorized

What is the education revolution and what does technology have to do with it?

It all started with the famous Ken Robinson talk explaining how schools kill creativity. In a few minutes of caustic British humor and explicit drawings, we understood how the current education system has been created to answer the standardized needs of the industrial revolution but can no longer meet the flexibility and diversity needed in today’s work market. Where we once needed obedient uniform soldiers, we are now looking for witty and dynamic individuals. Some even question the relevance of traditional higher education.

How can we prevent students from getting bored? How can we prevent school drop-outs from classes of one-size-fits-all?

And above all, how do we harness the technology to give access to education to the 80% of youth who currently will not have a highschool diploma?

In his book, “The One World School House”, Salman Khan, the Founder of Khan Academy, one of the most famous free online education videos website says: “Technology-enhanced teaching and learning is our best chance for an affordable and equitable educational future.”

The democratization of education is in march.

One of the best examples is Shai Reshef’s University of the People, the world’s first tuition-free online university dedicated to the democratization of higher education.

There is also Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company based in Mountain View, CA. They are partnering with 33 top universities in the world and are proposing to “Take the world’s best courses, online, for free.” The start-up raised $16 million last year to offer the best online education worldwide for free. And we can’t forget Udacity, which also aims at bringing “university-level education to the masses”.

The world’s most prestigious universities have taken advantage of the opportunity to be among the first ones to deliver their renowned curriculum online: Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have partnered together to create EdX, their own interactive online open education courses. Along with offering online courses, these institutions use this opportunity to research how people learn and how technology transforms learning.

Additionally, Stanford is currently offering popular online engineering classes free of charge.

This new wave of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Course) is constantly in the news and journalists are asking “Has the future of college moved online?”

Technology in education

It is certain that technology has offered new perspectives—learning can now move to the home, at each person’s pace, and surely we will all transition from books to tablets in a few years. It not only meets the needs for lifelong learning and constant renewal of skills, but it also lowers the inequalities in access to knowledge, inequalities that are related to geographical or financial background, disabilities, socio-cultural context, age or gender.

Different initiatives have so far leveraged the power of technology to share knowledge:

– Skillshare is a famous global community where you can learn real-world skills from incredible teachers.

– General Assembly transforms thinkers into creators through education and opportunities in technology, business, and design.

– Une minute pour comprendre in France supports students after school.

– Hadithi is an online repository of open access (OA) research for university students, academics and researchers. They build partnerships with OA publishers across the world, obtain their content and then host it on their platform.

Education around the world

In South Africa, CIDA is the first virtually free higher education institution in South Africa, offering holistic education to historically disadvantaged youth who would not otherwise be able to access higher education. And Ikamvayouth equips learners from disadvantaged communities with the knowledge, skills, networks and resources to access tertiary education and/or employment opportunities once they matriculate. The organization’s sustainability is driven by alumni who gain entrance to tertiary institutions and return to tutor.

The whole movement is questioning the standard method of teaching, building a collaborative model where there is no top-down relationship but rather an equalizing horizontal exchange between learners and “knowledge-providers”.

Thus, Thibaut Labarre from Les nouveaux Etudiants describes how involving teachers, students and administrators into dialogues and incorporating alternative technologies can bring change to the education system. They set up Edu’Hack’tions, a workshop between innovative students and teachers who wants to “hack” education and find ways to conceive impassioning, efficient, smart and fun classes.

UniShared, Connecting Learners, is a platform for collaborative and open notes taking. Practically speaking, it leverages Google Docs real-time technology to connect amphitheaters with the rest of the world, in order to improve the way people learn.

Cup of Teach is the first university between individuals, proposing practical, cheap and collective workshops next to your place.

Living School is a private primary and elementary school with the mission to foster, through education and training, the emergence into the world of fulfilled and responsible citizens, actors who will contribute to the veritable evolution of humanity.

At the end of the day, the education revolution is all about customization and adapting to each student’s personal pace.

For example, in its model of the flipped classroom, Knewton is delivering instruction online outside the class to dedicate the class time to answer specific questions. This challenges the one-size-fits-all traditional model and the “balkanization” of teaching different subjects in different silos.

And the focus is not only the students but also on the teachers, since technology is not supposed to threaten the teachers, but rather to help them focus on the content and personalize their approach. Many initiatives focus on how to facilitate teaching and share resources.

For example, Fullmarks is a tool to support educators by allowing them to work together, sharing questions and tests, and analyzing results.

Even the TED conference has created the TED-Ed, Lessons worth sharing where any teacher can use engaging videos to create customized lessons. Educators can use, tweak, or completely redo any lesson featured on TED-Ed, or create lessons from scratch based on any video from YouTube. They can turn a video into a customized lesson that can be assigned to students or shared more widely. They can add context, questions and follow-up suggestions.

New Teacher Center (NTC) is partnering with Coursera to offer high-quality online professional learning for K-12 teachers via MOOC. They believe teachers are learners too, and they support new teachers through an online mentoring platform, eMSS.

Guru-G is democratizing education by first democratizing access to quality teachers. It creates a game-based teaching, teacher training, and open certification platform.

This revolution also applies to traditional studies like business schools.

In Denmark, KaosPilot, a ground-breaking global educational model, is dedicated to teaching creative entrepreneurship and social innovation. From its base in Denmark, this school has spent the past twenty years training socially responsible entrepreneurs and agents of change, creative and committed young people seeking to create value, make a difference and shape the society of the future.

In Spain, in the Basque Country, the cooperative Mondragon is offering the MINN Program [International Executive Master Program in Intrapreneurship and Open Innovation]. They call themselves “a lively, constantly evolving executive learning journey at the service of creative processes, participatory and open environments.” Their goals are to research and evaluate the relationships between individuals, modern businesses, and communities. They promote experimentation and cross-discipline education/experiences.

A new model

Traditional teaching techniques are challenged: In this video of Fast CoExist, Seth Godin or the last TED prize Sugata Mitra explain how the current educational system has its origins in the military system creating identical individuals, obedient soldiers and docile customers.

However, education has been moving farther and farther away from this traditional model—students should be creative, have fun while learning, and master critical thinking and analytical skills. Numerous studies are showing that kids learn better when they are playing, as opposed to feeling forced. Because of this, gaming is becoming a much more important part of education.

Dr. Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest. In 1999, Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

The “Hole in the Wall” project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge.

In the makers community, Hackidemia designs workshops and kits enabling kids to use curiosity, play, and empathy to solve global challenges. All over the world, they organize workshops fostering collaboration between schools, tech companies and kids in the development of 3D-enabled curricula, tools, and learning environments for the 21st century learner.

Three Coins uses social online gaming for training financial literacy skills and was awarded Coca Cola’s “Ideas against Poverty” prize.

And Medialab in Madrid organizes a urban camp of active, experimental and learning space for kids during the mornings: A big laboratory where you can make your own robot, design and build your musical instrument, a radio or even play with food and discover how math is not just numbers. Throughout the day kids participate and discover some of the newest technologies developed by Medialab-Prado’s work groups: 3D printing, electronics applied to almost everything or food reuse to learn not to throw food away.

Each year, different forums focus on the new trends on how to revolutionize the field of education:

The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) is dedicated to building the future of education through innovation. This annual three-day event in Doha, Qatar, brings together over 1,000 top decision-makers, thought-leaders, practitioners and education stakeholders from a wide variety of sectors and more than 100 countries to seek innovative solutions to today’s educational challenges and to share best practices.

The world is changing and the way we learn as well. How will this affect the traditional education system is still a mystery. But all these innovations are aiming at a greater access to knowledge for all.

So let us know if you have come across any innovative education venture you wish to share with us! Contact us at www.theafactor.org.

Nairobi: Thriving Entrepreneurship Hub of East Africa

by Aurelie Salvaire Nairobi

In her TED Talk, « The danger of a single story », my favourite Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains how dangerous it is to reduce a person, a culture, a continent to a unique and biased perception.

The viral Youtube video “Africa for Norway” with Africans actually raising funds and sending sun to Norway where people are freezing uses a disruptive angle to underline we still often consider African countries as needy and corrupted places.

But the truth is we have so much to learn from countries jumping a quantum leap from traditional markets to 3G in a couple of years.

As the Misfit economy book demonstrates it, innovation often happens in the most surprising places, and even pirates, terrorists, computer hackers and inner city gangs could teach us some interesting lessons…

But without going so off the beaten track, the last edition of Courrier International, Africa 3.0, celebrates the renewal of the continent through its most promising innovators and the new relationship out of “creativity, fraternity and tolerance” we might need to learn from.

So when the A factor decided to scout for the next Inn ovati on tour, Nairobi came as an evident answer.

Beyond the traditional images of wildlife safaris and traditional masai outfits, the Kenyan capital has been rising in the last year as the most promising IT hub of the East of the continent.

Google, IBM, Microsoft have installed their regional headquarters there. Apart from the grassroots innovations, Kenya is also emerging as a perfect experimentation field for « frugal innovation » for multinational companies. After Nokia, IBM is now opening its R&D lab in Nairobi.

Almost on the same timezone as Europe, english speaking, easily reachable by major airline companies overnight and now denominated the Silicon Savannah, the city is hosting an incredible critical mass of start-ups and tech entrepreneurs. Different incubators, as 88mph or GrowthAfrica, most of them supported by foreign capital tend to identify the next generation of promising entrepreneurs and Demo Africa will be showcasing during the next month of October start-ups from allover Africa with high potential to succeed. And there are still so many to discover…

The first day in Nairobi took place at the iHUB, a thriving ecosystem of start-ups and programmers which has soon become the place to be in terms of networking events. At the end of Ngong road, the mall hosting the HUB is also the home of Ushaidi, the worldfamous crowdsourcing map, meaning “testimony” in Swahili, initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008.

Erik Hersmann, the founder of this open source project which allows users to crowdsource crisis information to be sent via mobile, explains how Nairobi is growing and how Ushaidi is now working on a back-up generator for Internet.

Within a few square meters, one can meet Amrit Pal, one of the heads of Kopo Kopo, a system which enables small and medium businesses to accept mobile payments and build relationships with their customers or Kenfield Griffith from MSurvey, allowing to collect data and information through cell phone.

All of them are surfing on the success of M-pesa, the largest mobile money network launched by Safaricom, Kenya’s major phone operator. Through any phone, even the most simple ones, one can exchange cash for Mpesa “credit” and send money to the other side of the country or pay a coffee in a local cafeteria. Given the cell phone penetration, this represents now a serious threat to the traditional banking system.

But Kenya is not only about technology. With millions of people living with less than 1 dollar a day, many entrepreneurs have developed innovative solutions for the Base of the Pyramid:

In terms of Water and Sanitation, Iko Toilet is now providing the first mobile vacuum toilet system of its kind in Africa and Sanergy is developing economically sustainable distributed sanitation infrastructure for informal settlements.

Barefoot Power is providing affordable lighting and phone charging products specifically for low income populations that do not have access to electricity. They work in collaboration with women groups, especially with CARE and their major initiative Light up a village is getting famous.

Mobius motors is a Kenyan car company currently rolling out their second fully functional prototype.

In the field of agriculture, One Acre Fund now knows an exponential growth providing package of seed, advice and training to farmers in order to improve their productivity and income.

Or finally Jacaranda Health, fully dedicated to safe motherhood in East Africa. and setting up mobile clinics in maternal health delivery.

The major slums of Kibera or Mathare are also thriving environments for this “frugal innovation”. Fred, the curator of TEDxMathare, brings me along the unpaved road and would like to expose more untapped ideas coming from the grassroots level.

MYSA, for example, is empowering youth of underprivileged areas through sports activities and became one of the world’s leading sport for development organisation.

In Kibera, the most “famous” slum in town which sometimes absorbs all the attention especially after JR large photographs pasted on walls and trains in “Women are heroes”, different initiatives flourish like the Hot sun foundation film school, Identifying and developing youth talent in East Africa to tell their stories on film or the Community cooker, turning rubbish into energy.

Female gamechangers are also extremely active.

Akili Dada empowers the next generation of African women leaders through its incubator investing in high-achieving young African women. Akira Chix teaches IT to women and girls and the regional office of Samasource outsources basic encoding or programming tasks to youth and women from underprivileged areas.

Ella and its Shopsoko connects artisans to a global market through very simple phones with artisans run, peer recruitment and product tracking.

But the innovation is not the exclusivity of the start up scene. Even the major NGOs or international institutions explore here new ways of working: would it be the cash transfers operated by Oxfam in case of emergencies instead of the traditional food distribution or the coupons transfers in Somalia of the World Food Pr

ogram realized in collaboration with Mastercard. The dynamic environment and the technology facilities enhance the exploration of new options.

A mobile app has even been created, Refugies United, to help families reconnect with missing loved ones after a forced displacement.

Yet, as Simon Stumpf, the head of Ashoka East Africa says: “Impact investment is still in its infancy here.” There is a real need expressed by the entrepreneurs themselves for more mentoring and partnerships in order to reach major size and market.

The investors already present (Invested Development, Village Capital, Acción, Helios Investment, Jacana Partners,…) consider Kenya ecosystem more early stage than other countries like South Africa for example. The multiplication of entrepreneurs competition also led to a perversion of the system and the apparition of “competrepreneurs” who might only look for grants but not really set up a business. Seed funding and mentoring is then still extremely necessary in order to ensure a full scale up of these initiatives.

This vibrant environment is fueled by a a promising generation of makers (Fablab), activists (check out Powa254), artists (Kuona Trust or Godown Arts Center) or fashion brands (Kiko Romeo or Savannah Chic) who are shaking up Kenya’s traditional ecosystem.

And the new 4-story sound studio unlike anything in Africa of Spielworks, a local Kenya TV production company who just received a large infusion of investment is demostrating that Kenya is moving.

And beyond the strong concentration of Nairobi, progressively appear new upcoming entrepreneurship hubs as Kampala, Kigali and Dar-es Salaam.

So, after only a few days in town, our mind is full of projects, contacts and initiatives waiting for more connections and visibility. Coming from a relatively demoralized Old Continent, one can consider that an exposure to such a vibrant ecosystem is definitely a boost in terms of inspiration and network but it’s key to imagine it as a conversation of equals and a source of mutual learning.

To learn more about the Nairobi Innovation tour, contact us !

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